[GreenKeys] Replacing Chad, was: Black tape

[Jones, Douglas W]

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From: Chris Elmquist [chrise at pobox.com], Saturday, June 20, 2015 6:01 PM

I have black tape that was heavily redacted after someone put the chads
back in a lot of places.
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Back in early 2001, I went down to Tallahassee to testify in the US
Civil Rights Commission hearings on the 2000 election.  (The CSPAN
coverage might still be on line somewhere -- I testified shortly after
Jeb Bush.)

At the time, I was chair of the Iowa Board of Examiners for Voting
Machines, etc, and my testimony was about the machines in use in
Florida at the time.  We never legalized the use of punched cards for
anything but absentee ballots in Iowa, but because some counties used
them for absentee voting, I had (still have) hundreds of Votomatic
ballots, and I'd done some testing on them.  You can look here for
all I have learned about Votomatic chad, most of it after the hearings:
-- http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/cards/chad.html

Anyway, one of the more fun things I did during my testimony was
use a paperclip to poke lots of chad out of a votomatic card and then,
while speaking, iron the chad back into the holes using my fingernail
against the desktop.  As my tesimony wrapped up, I passed around
the card I'd been playing with.  They'd all seen me punch it, and as it
was circulated, you couldn't tell where it had been punched.

The idea of the Votomatic machine is brilliant, and I give lots of credit
to Joseph Harris for its invention.  He was aiming at a price point that
is just right, and for 1965 (the approximate year of inventon), it was
a great example of up-to-the-minute technology (without quite being
out on the bleeding edge).

The flaws in the Votomatic were a bit subtle, but in retrospect, if you
read the patents for the IBM Portapunch (the direct predecessor of
the Votomatic) and for the Votomatic, you find that the flaw that was its
eventual downfall -- at least in the public's mind -- is fully documented
in the patents.  Of course IBM's (and later CESI's, after IBM walked
away from the Votomatic in the late 1960s) salesmen never mentioned
those flaws.

                     Doug Jones
                     jones at cs.uiowa.edu